Architect：YIIIE Architects

Location：Yazhou Road, Shuangliu, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Project Year：2024

Category：Shops

CPI W-18b is a new small-scale commercial building located in the lakeside CPI commercial cluster in Chengdu. The owner hopes the building can seamlessly integrate with the lakeside, trees, and environment while creating a vibrant new commercial usage scenario with a sense of publicness.

The owner has raised questions on how design can better assist commercial scenes in achieving sustainable development and how small-scale commercial buildings can respond to demands for publicness. This presents an opportunity to delve into the relationship between commercial space and public space (publicness) as well as sustainability issues.

1.     Public Space (Publicness):

CPI, as a "natural wild garden-style" standalone commercial cluster community, connects scattered individual commercial units through the aggregation of "public spaces" such as parks, squares, open spaces, sidewalks, waterfronts, and streets. While the community provides these public spaces, we believe that commercial units should also shoulder some public responsibility. Guests who are tired from walking should not only be able to sit on benches by the roadside but also be able to sit outside each shop. If each unit only pursues maximizing business area or strictly guards its boundaries, then the community will be fragmented, disjointed, and even composed of opposing segments.

2.     Light Structural Materials, Emphasizing Spatial Forms:

To achieve the above spatial ideals and enable more freedom and possibilities for the space, we have adopted a strategy of lightweight structural materials and emphasizing spatial forms in construction logic. The use of a 100*100-sized steel frame, sunlight panels, and pressure-regulated steel plates, among other industrial products, enables low cost, rapid construction, and compliance with green energy requirements. Under lightweight industrial materials, wooden materials are used for local beams and columns to create a cozy community atmosphere.

3.     Sustainability:

The gap between the speed of information in modern society and the "time lag" of the real world has led to urban hollowness and anxiety. We hope to confront this anxiety by orienting towards sustainable development and creating buildings that are perceptive to the present moment and changes.

Mesh canopies are used for the building facade, not emphasizing the building's outline. Fallen leaves on the canopy become part of the building process and materials. The appearance of the building changes with the seasons, from green to yellow, and from sparse to dense,emphasizing an unfinished, evolving state. Combined with Chengdu's local climate characteristics, the boundaries between artificial and natural are blurred, utilizing tree canopies to form spaces, extending outdoor stone paving indoors, and bringing soil and small flowers into the interior. The facade adopts a multi-layered structure, with the outer layer's mesh providing permeability for environmental protection and energy conservation when the temperature is suitable, while the inner layer's glass sliding doors provide insulation and anti-theft features.

Conclusion:

Any form of commerce has a certain degree of public space attributes, and public spaces also possess conditions for commercial activities. They have a mutually beneficial relationship that needs to be verified. "Was the birth of urban public space invented or achieved through negotiation?" This question also applies here. Negotiation is a reciprocal change, and sustainability is an adaptive change. In this 10-year limited community, we aim to use these ten years to verify our understanding of sustainability and the reality of sustainability being "unsustainable (unchanging)".

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